Kickstart Tahiti, the Euro-Style Board Game for the Whole Family

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Kickstart Tahiti, the Euro-Style Board Game for the Whole Family

We used Lego in our print-and-play version.Photo: Chuck Lawson/Wired

Ah, European-style board games. They have been the gateway to a revival in the appreciation for tabletop gaming for so many, myself included. Casual and experienced gamers alike love games like the Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne, which have relatively simple rules that are easy to learn but which also feature deep game play, random board setup and mechanics that keep players in the game until the very end.

A new entrant into the field is Tahiti, by Minion Games, makers of The Manhattan Project and Those Pesky Humans, among others. Tahiti is a pick-up-and-deliver game set in a South-Pacific archipelago. Players set out in canoes from their home island to gather food and crops from the surrounding islands. Points are awarded for the crops players bring back, and each player secretly has family favorites they try to gather, which add bonus points to their total.

Players also each take turns controlling Haumea, the goddess of fertility, as she uncovers new islands and seeds the existing islands with crops to be gathered, giving players the chance to build the board in their favor. As the seasons change, crops get harder to gather and your canoe can only hold so many goods, making it difficult to move or dangerous to cross reefs that surround the islands. Eventually, the game ends and the player who gathers the most food wins.

James Mathe, the owner of Minion Games, is turning to Kickstarter to get Tahiti manufactured. In addition to getting a print-and-play version of the game immediately for $1, there are some stretch goals to get some upgrades to the game pieces, including custom dies to make some great-looking player tokens.

I backed the project to receive a complete copy when it's done, and within a day I received the print-and-play version to start playing immediately. My kids, ages 5 and 3, were immediately excited about what I was up to. The Kickstarter description indicates that Tahiti is appropriate for ages 6 and up, so I wanted to play-test the game with my son. While I was cutting out the game pieces, I set the kids out to scour our Lego bins for one-by-one cubes to use as the crop resources.

Once we had everything ready, I began explaining to my son how the game worked. He immediately grasped how the canoes worked to determine how many actions you could take per turn (normally four, one for each rower's space) and how collecting crops affects your actions. (Rowers who have to hold on to crops instead of rowing mean they can't take an action.) He'd try to avoid reefs but occasionally would take a gamble on crossing them to bring his crops back home, and if he lost crops as a result, he was a good sport about it.

Tahiti doesn't use dice, instead handling randomness by having players pull the crop cubes out of a bag. As there is an even number of resources at the start, your chances of drawing any one cube shift as resources come into play. So if your family loves coconuts, but they haven't been drawn in a while, your chances of drawing coconuts from the bag increase. The risk when crossing reefs comes in to play by drawing resources from the bag as well. If you draw a matching resource of anything you have in your canoe, you'll lose that resource to the sea and they're all returned to the bag.

We had a lot of fun playing Tahiti. It's imaginative, and the inclusion of proper names was a fun exposure to Pacific Island languages. While I simplified the rules for playing with my son, it's clear from reading the rules that there is deeper gameplay to be had through strategizing where to place islands, which islands to seed crops on, and which islands to turn fallow at the end of the season. These can give you an edge over your opponents, making it easier for you to gather certain crops or harder for them.

Check out Minion Games' Kickstarter pitch for more information about the game, and consider backing a print-and-play version for a buck. It's an incredible value and a fantastic way to try the game out for yourself before upping your pledge for a manufactured version or picking one up in the store when it's released. As Tahiti is already funded, some version of this game will be shipping. But those stretch goals look great and with six days to go before the end of the campaign, they're attainable.

I can't wait to play Tahiti more with my kids. It's a fantastic entry into the world of Euro-style board games with a rule set that makes some room for tinkering for their level. We loved it and I think you will too.

Editor's note: I've also tried out the print-and-play version, and liked it enough to back for a full copy as well. It's a terrific game and the mechanism of drawing cubes out of a bag lends itself to a really fascinating ebb and flow of resources. — Jonathan Liu